The following is from Michael Medved at The Daily Beast and we’re putting it up here not for the political content (JCF is only interested in the politics of Barsoom and Hollywood!) but for the comments about John Carter.

From the Daily Beast: Hollywood reporters say Disney’s costly adventure is a flop, while box-office results and moviegoers tell another story. Are media outlets also missing the big picture on Romney?

When the media herd heaps premature ridicule on some presumed epic failure, they’ll seldom reconsider the available evidence and admit that they’ve been wrong. Just ask John Carter—and Mitt Romney.

John Carter, an expensive Disney sci-fi spectacular released March 9, provoked gleefully hostile comments from prominent press outlets that seemed to celebrate the film’s disastrous reception. A headline from NBC New York asked, “Was ‘John Carter’ the Biggest Flop Ever?” while Fox News proclaimed that “$250 million ‘John Carter’ Bombs at Box Office.” Entertainment reporters giddily compared the project to other notorious disasters like Heaven’s Gate—a bloated 1980 Western immortalized in a 1984 bestseller I co-authored with my brother Harry Medved called The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History.

A New York Times report on John Carter’s purportedly catastrophic debut referenced another multimegaton bomb in its catchy headline: “‘Ishtar’ Lands on Mars.” The Journal of Record compared the new Disney release about a Civil War veteran who flees Apaches and finds himself magically transported to the Red Planet with the 1987 humiliation inflicted on Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty for their wretched comedy about talentless rock musicians forced into a high-risk adventure in North Africa. Reporter Brooks Barnes acknowledged that John Carter “had suffered months of ridicule on the Internet and had taken on a funereal aura” even before its Los Angeles debut. Rich Ross, chairman of Disney Studios, told Variety: “I’ve never had something healthy get treated like a corpse.” As if to confirm his pronouncement, The Detroit News ran a prerelease headline proclaiming: “‘John Carter’ Set to Bomb Big.”